The Yuba County Five

Summary

Five men drove home from a basketball game and did not arrive. Their car was found four days later on a snowbound forest road, seventy miles in the wrong direction, undamaged, with fuel in the tank. It could have been driven away.

Four of the men were eventually found dead in the mountains. One has never been found at all.

The central fact of this case is not that they vanished. It is that they walked away from a working car, in the snow, at night, and kept walking, and nothing anyone has proposed in nearly fifty years explains why.

What is documented

The men. Ted Weiher, 32; Jack Madruga, 30; Bill Sterling, 29; Jack Huett, 24; and Gary Mathias, 25. Four of them had intellectual disabilities. Mathias had been diagnosed with schizophrenia, which was managed with medication and was reported to be under control.

They were teammates on a special-needs basketball team, and they were serious about it. On 24 February 1978 they drove from Yuba City to Chico to watch a game. They had a tournament of their own the following morning, and they were determined not to miss it.

The drive home. They set out to return to Yuba City. On the way they stopped at a shop and bought snacks. That is the last confirmed sighting.

They never arrived. They never turned up for the tournament, which the people who knew them regarded as the single most implausible part of the whole case.

The car. On 28 February, Madruga's 1969 Mercury Montego was found on a mountain road in the Plumas National Forest. It was about seventy miles from their route home, in the opposite direction, high in the Sierra Nevada, in winter, at night.

The car was not damaged. It was not stuck. It was not out of fuel; it had roughly a quarter of a tank. When it was found, it started, and it was driven away under its own power.

Nothing about the vehicle explains why anyone left it.

Weiher. Four months later, in June, Ted Weiher's body was found in a US Forest Service trailer, roughly nineteen miles from the car. He had died of hypothermia and starvation. He had lost a very large amount of weight, and his beard had grown; the assessment was that he had survived in the trailer for somewhere between eight and thirteen weeks.

He was wrapped in sheets. His shoes were missing.

The trailer, which is the hardest part. It contained a large quantity of food. It contained propane. It contained matches. It contained a functioning heater and stove.

Weiher opened some tinned rations and used a candle. He did not use the heater. He did not use the stove. He did not light a fire. He starved and froze in a shelter that had, sitting in it, everything required to keep him alive.

The others. The remains of Madruga and Sterling were found in the mountains. Huett's remains were found. Gary Mathias has never been found.

The witness. Joseph Schons had driven up the same road that night to check a snowmobile route, and his car had become stuck. While he was there he suffered a mild heart attack and spent the night in his vehicle. He reported seeing headlights behind him and hearing voices, including what he took to be a woman and a baby, and whistling. He called out. Nobody came. The lights eventually went out.

Leading explanations

They got lost, and then something went wrong. The car took a wrong turn onto a mountain road, at night, in snow. That much is ordinary; it happens constantly. What is not ordinary is everything after it. They did not turn around. They did not stay with the vehicle, which is the single most consistent piece of survival advice in existence. They left it, in the dark, in the snow, and walked nineteen miles up.

Mathias. The theory that has attracted the most attention is that Gary Mathias, whose schizophrenia was under management but who had a history of episodes, suffered an episode and either led or drove the group into the mountains. Mathias is the only one never found, which has been read both as evidence for this and as evidence that he made it further than the others.

The registry notes that this theory rests on a diagnosis and not on any evidence about that night, and that it is being asked to carry a great deal of weight it has never been given anything to bear. His family have consistently rejected it.

Foul play. Someone directed or forced them up the road. It accounts for the wrong turn, the abandoned vehicle and the direction. There is no physical evidence for it: no sign of struggle, no third-party evidence at the car, and nothing in the forensic record.

Weiher and the trailer. No proposed explanation for the trailer is satisfying. Suggestions include that the men did not know how to operate the propane appliances; that they were waiting for the others to return and were unwilling to disturb the place; or that Weiher was too weakened by the time he reached it. Each is possible. None of them accounts for a man freezing to death over two months beside an unused box of matches.

Current status

Unsolved. Four men found, one missing, a working car on a road it had no reason to be on, and a shelter stocked with food and heat in which a man starved and froze.

Every element of this case is documented and none of the explanations reaches the ones that matter. The registry keeps it because it is a rare thing: a disappearance with an abundance of evidence and no shortage of investigation, which remains, after nearly fifty years, simply and completely opaque.

Last reviewed: July 2026. Records are provisional. Where the evidence changes, the entry changes. Found an error? Tell us.